Conventionally, the identification of leaders starts with human nomination, either by a supervisor or by peer recommendation. This method suffers from limitations like recency or primacy effect and subjective bias. Recency bias occurs when an assessor is immensely influenced by the information that is presented later (more recently) rather than the earlier one in any given selection process. In contrast, primacy bias occurs when an assessor's selection is made based on information that was presented earlier (primary information) rather than later in a process. Along with such limitations, superiors or peers tend to rely mostly on the past performance as a key indicator in deciding the future leaders. Also, for potential leadership, all the employees are not considered, instead, only the profiles of short-listed/nominated individuals are considered.
A strong leadership pipeline must attract, retain and develop the leaders throughout the organization, right from project team leader to general manager to top executive. This results in an efficient succession management system that provides opportunities to the home grown leaders to move up in the organization-pyramid, it also increases their morale and prevents them from leaving the organization. This in-turn assists organizations to deal with high potential attrition and allows them to focus on organizational excellence. Thus, there is a need for an automated system which eliminates/minimizes the manual process of leader selection and assesses all employee profiles as potential leaders.